There are moments when using technologies that one has a sense of bruised trust. More specifically, in this recent case, I lost a whole demo course.

A demo course, in this case, was one created to showcase the work of various faculty using the LMS that the office I work for puts out. This course was organized along both a university track and a K-12 track.

This course had modules from a variety of fields. It had an e-book on grain science. It had a faculty handbook. It had scholarly articles on e-learning. It had lectures, videos, rubrics, and slideshows. It had mock interactive sessions. It had assessments.

The instructional designers had pulled out all stops to make this course a reality.

The first signs that something might have been wrong came when I got a call from a developer. Given the scarcity and high cost of developer time, that should have been indication enough. And when the conversation went a while longer, I realized that what was happening could be serious.

A system update crashed the former version. Those who should have had this on their radars missed it. Very human issues.

Grief Cycles

There's a speeded up version of the grief cycle for loss of digital materials. I had the backup files for the course...for some parts of it anyway. I wrote off the assessments. I wrote off the annotations and interrelationships. I figured that I could make this back-burner project which I would build on piecemeal...

But Then

But then, after another flurry of emails, suddenly, it was all back. All of it. The annotations were in place. Even the recently uploaded videos were all there, and they played well. It was at a new URL (try.axiolearning.org), and the old URL and version had been retired.

One of the developers outside my office said that it was likely all safe somewhere. It sure didn't seem like it would be in those early anxious days.

There's not any real lesson to this...only the joy of a salvaged demo course. Well, maybe a need for hopefulness and patience.